Silent Night?

One of the things I love about Christmas is singing carols. We try not to sing carols in Sunday worship during advent (we stick to the advent hymns). But there are still plenty of other times to sing the carols - the familiar and the new songs that tell and retell the story, that remind us of layers of meanings, and that are just fun to share. We have had various carol services, and there have been carols playing over the sound system for the last week or so.
But - like many others, - I have had the lurgy over the last couple of weeks. The aches and pains passed quite quickly, and even the sniffles disappeared pretty fast. But then there was the cough.... It's not too bad, but it does flare up when I giggle - or when I sing! And so I have been not singing. It happens at various points in the year, since whenever I have a cold, it hits my voice. But somehow, it has more impact not singing the carols.
Talking to others, I'm not alone in this. Somehow, missing carols is more frustrating than not singing at other times of the year.
And it leaves me wondering why? Is it because we sing them for such a short period - miss them now, and there's twelve months before they can be sung again? Is it because we - some of us at least - have sung them all our lives, and their familiarity draws us into security and comfort, especially when life feels pretty grim? Is it because they are such beautiful examples of poetry and music (no - I don't think so!)?
All of these might be true, and none the worse for that. But I am also wondering if it there is more. Is it that the wonder of Christmas - of Incarnation, the Word become flesh, Immanuel - that this is more than we can say. And singing, making music, letting ourselves go in the experience is part of our wonder and worship.
May Christmas blessings be yours.

Swords and Plough-shares?

Our carol service/concert was on Friday evening, and very good it was too. Our own instrumentalists and choir, together with the Mary Ward singers and the choir of the Japanese fellowship all took part in leading us, and there were several opportunities for the congregation to sing as well. And we interspersed the music with readings which told the story of "the passing on of the light", starting from the creation right through until today. It was good way to anchor our celebrations in the whole story of the action of God with people.
As part of our reading, we passed on a light. We had decorated the church using, among other things, large light sticks. We took one of these, and each reader passed it to the next, symbolising the light being passed through history.
All of which was fine, until we looked closely at the light sticks - light sabres, modelled on the weapons used in Star Wars!
Which raises an interesting point. Was this an appropriate symbol of our celebration of the light and life that enlightens everybody coming into the world, as the gospel of John puts it? Can the coming of the Prince of Peace truly be recognised with an, albeit fictional, weapon?
It is a question - or at least, a form of a question, that arises in all sorts of areas. To what extent do we live the life of the Kingdom using the patterns, tools and structures which are not of the Kingdom? Clearly we can't live in an isolated bubble, far away from the messiness of the world as it is. We live in a political, financial and power-wielding world. To opt out of that, to say we have nothing to do with it, to pretend we are not part of it - those are options that are not open to us.
But how do we "sing the Lord's song in a strange land" as the Israelites in exile had to question - how do we celebrate the coming of the Prince of Peace in a context of violence, power-politics and fear? Can we use light sabres to do it?
I don't know the answer - only that the question won't go away. Part of me wants to say that we take the weapons, structures and manipulations of that which is not the Kingdom and refashion them. After all - we didn't use the sabres to fight during the service.
But I am left wondering if that is enough. Some of the youngsters who were present were fascinated by the sabres - and did fight with them. The pull of their identity as weapons is very strong. How do we prevent ourselves from being drawn into the patterns whose remaking we are looking for?
I do believe worship plays a part here - the telling and retelling of the gospel truths about who God is and so who we are becoming; that regular reminding of the truth of our identity on Christ which can get so easily overwhelmed by the often louder voices.
And so it is reassuring that several people asked me - usually flippantly- just why we were using light sabres as symbols in our carol service. There is enough gospel identity among us to recognise the inconsistency. And that will do as a reminder of what that gospel identity is.

Simon's back!!! Such good news - after a three month sabbatical, Simon has returned and the ministry team is back to full strength again.
Sabbaticals are an important part of a minister's development and ongoing growth. They fit easily into a professional model of continuing professional development, and into the kind of self-fulfiment concept that is very prevalent today; my right to do what I need for my health, wellbeing or what ever it is. It is easy to look at sabbaticals as very individualistic. But as Simon has made clear elsewhere in saying thank you, sabbaticals are in fact very communal experiences. They can only happen, for example, if there is a team, or something approaching it, to allow the space for somebody to take that time. We are fortunate at Bloomsbury in having a ministry team which makes sabbatical a possibility, and we have been very fortunate during this sabbatical that many people have been able and willing to take on various responsibilities, so that nothing which ought to have been done was left undone.
The notion of sabbatical comes, of course, from the theology of sabbath; the gift of one day in seven in which not only is no work required, the people of God are actually forbidden to work, and commanded to rest in trust that God can sustain the world without our help.
Again, it is easy to see such a command as individualistic - my time off, my obedience to God, my guilt when I work too much. But the command was not given to individuals. It is a call to a people, a community. It is the people who are to celebrate being without doing on a regular basis. The Jewish community has developed this around household celebration - the gathering of the family for Sabbath, the sharing of the stories, of friendship, of hospitality.
As a community, at Bloomsbury, we are very busy. There is a lot to do. We do a lot, and are rightly proud of it and pleased with it. But, as Simon's sabbatical has shown us, one of the gifts we can give each other is also the possibility of sSabbath; of space and time to be - celebrating, recuperating, praying, relaxing.
On behalf of the ministry team I want to thank everybody who helped us manage while Simon was sabbaticalling. Let's explore more ways in which we can do this for each other, and in which we can do it as a community.

This week, the Bloomsbury family has been at a funeral. Given the age profile of our congregation, we actually have very few funerals. But there was one this week. And what made it harder was that it was for a boy of 3 days old. No funeral is easy, but a funeral for a child who has not yet lived has a particular pain.
But we did it. We read the scriptures, and heard the promises and offered the prayers.
And we cried, and we said that we were angry. And we tried to understand, and we tried to accept that we will not understand.
Any death brings us face to face with mystery - and the death of a child most particularly. What is it to be alive? What is it to die? How do we find meaning, and what point is there?
These are questions we can usually pass by, or avoid thinking about because there is so much else to do. But when we stand in a wet graveyard, facing an open grave, then they cannot be avoided.
And I find that I have no answers. I speak the promises and offer the comfort that they affirm. But they are promises, not answers. The questions stay. And it feels very appropriate to Advent; hearing - and holding on, if only barely - to the promises, without being able to see yet what they really mean.
Just as it is is easy to avoid the big questions, the unanswerable questions in being busy, being useful, being fulfilled, so it is easy to move straight to Christmas with its strange fulfilment of promise and its wonderful truth, and to overlook the waiting, yearning, wondering of Advent. I would like never to do again what I had to do yesterday. But if I have to do it, Advent is the right time.

Last night we dissolved a committee! Always a good thing, I think - the fewer the committees, the nearer we are to the Kingdom. But this has been an important part of our life here at Blomsbury over the years, and its passing deserves notice.
The Central Committee dated from just over 100 years ago, and was part of a plan put in place to keep the church here at this site, and functioning. Drawing on resources and personnel from the wider Baptist community, the committee played a variety of roles over the years - often largely financial until very recently, and also a place to explore ideas, to try our possibilities, and to draw on wider wisdom. For the last few years, it has focussed less on finance, and more on helping the church, and the ministry team in particular, explore ways forward. With the changes in charity law, and with different ways of relating becoming stronger, the legal place of the committee was no longer necessary.
And so, with barely a blink, the committee dissolved itself.
For any who remember the huge place this committee has played over the years, it does feel rather as if it has ended not with a bang, but with a whimper.
But I think it has ended with grace, satisfaction and an alertness to the moving of the Spirit.
By voting itself out of existence, the committee has contined the practice of recent years of showing grace in the giving up of power, the letting go of control.
The committee has every right to be pleased at a job well done. Brought into being as a way of keeping this church functioning in this place, it can cease to function, secure that, in so far as we can every know what will happen, for the moment, the church is not only surviving, but thriving. And, a small part in the great effort, the committee has played its part in that.
And the committee has been alert to the movement of the Spirit, and been ready to respond as things have changed, and patterns have developed in new ways.
In its dissolution, the committee has offered one last service to the church it has served so faithfully. It has reminded us all as the people of God here and now, what it is to be graced, to be pleased with a good job, and to be alert to where God might lead us next.
To those who have served - representing those who served right back for over a century - thank you.
We dissolved a committee last night. It was a God-filled moment.

Can you see us?

Despite our prime location in central London, on a street which probably has one of the highest footfall counts of any locally, we as a building remain to many invisible. What is even harder to credit is that local residents - admittedly divided from us by a busy and rather messy road junction - don't credit it us with being a community that seeks to engage with them.

Where have we gone wrong? Surely if we are true to the Gospel we should be engaging with the local people as well as with the big global issues for which we do have a reputation that attracts attention?

Somehow we have failed to connect. Locally will claim to know we exist, could if pressed even give directions to find us BUT don't see what we offer as relevent to them or their needs.
Despite our best efforts over the last forty years and more (perhaps even since our founding in 1848) Bloomsbury has to be a community that has international, national and local concern.
Our programmes, especially our lunches on Sundays and Tuesdays, do appeal to some in the neighbourhood but many who do come from around and about the area have been doing so for years. We're not connecting with recent 'incomers' or those who have been around for years and who probably have long since dismissed us as irrelevant.

Struggling to get our identity right, grappling with public perception of us, living with the physical barriers of our isolation on a 'traffic island', all make it hard for us to be a church 'serving the community' - the strapline on our church coasters.

I guess waking up to the realities that these challenges present us is a first step to seeking to find solutions.

getting the rhythms right....

It's been a very Christmassy week this week here at Bloomsbury - for some of us at least. We have been finalising plans for the various events over Christmas, and producing material for the Christmas edition of the magazine. I was sitting at the keyboard doing some of it when I got a text from a friend asking what I was doing. Writing up stuff for Christmas I replied (some soon to appear on Christmas.org - check it out!) And then I commented that it felt very odd to be doing it so early in November. My friend texted back pointing out that Starbucks were advertising their Christmas red cups that week too. I was in good company.
I'm not sure that it made me feel much better, but it was a good reminder that it is not just in church life that the calendar can get dislocated. During my years in pastorate, I have got used to doing most of my thinking, reflecting, creating - and praying - about Christmas at the end of October and the beginning November, beginning to think about Lent on the day after Boxing day, and trying to get my head round Easter Day weeks before I have been able to engage in community with Good Friday. It is ones of the joys and challenges of trying to make sure that we don't hit the major festivals unprepared.
Does it matter? I'm not sure. After all, if the truths these festivals celebrate are the truths in which we live, they are not attached to particular dates. If Jesus is born as a human being, this is not only true in December, and the hope of the resurrection is not only vaild on a variety of dates in March and April.
However, I think there's something important in the rhythms of the year, moving through the story in order, and regularly. It helps us to keep anchored to the story, and not to remove it into some kind of timeless system of principles which are detached form the experience of living in time and space. It stops us from staying only in the safe places of the bits of the story we "like" - if we move through the story in order, we cannot separate the baby in the manger from the fleeing refugees or the slain infants. We cannot isolate the angels proclamation from the pain of the betrayal in the garden, and we can't live in the joy of the resurrection without weeping at the Cross.
And even more fundamentally, by telling the story in order, by tracing it through the year, event by event, we keep it fresh, we don't get bored with it, we meet, with delight and with some trepidation, the promises and challenges that come to us with the various aspects of the gospel.
You see, I think in this, Starbucks has got it right. They produce the red cups once a year. They are anticipated, they are enjoyed, they are missed. But there is no chance just to take the for granted.
If we listen carefully to the rhythms of our faith, let these rhythms shape our lives and responses, we will keep alive to the wonder and the mystery of the life God calls us into.
And if you want to know what we are doing at Christmas, keep an eye on the website calendar. All news will appear there soon.

Although it is a few weeks since I came home from the EBF Council in Lisbon (see previous post for more details!), I remain haunted by some of the stories I heard there. In particular, the accounts from the churches in Turkmenistan and Azerbaijan. In both these contexts, Christians - and Baptists in particular - come under real and sustained pressure. We heard the story of one brother who had had to escape from Turkmenistan, because the threat to his life and the life of his family was so great. After enduring imprisonment and torture, he went into hiding. Eventually making contact with the US Embassy, they told him that, as long as he remained in the country, they could not help him. He and the family escaped to Russia and lived for 10 months underground there. However, that became unsafe as well, and they were eventually smuggled out to Scandinavia, where he now lives, and where he devotes his time to maintaining a radio service to Turkmenistan, broadcasting Christian teaching, and encouraging those who remain.

There is one registered Baptist church in Turkmenistan - a church that is recognised by the government, and allowed to meet in restricted circumstances. Under their umbrella, there exist five congregations. But the other congregations are not allowed to meet together. And so they meet in relays through the week. Each day, some of the fellowship meet together. And they face opposition, arrest, the threats of imprisonment and torture.


Similarly in Azerbaijan, there is pressure. At the Council meeting last year, we were being asked to pray for Pastor Zaur, who had been arrested and accused of keeping a firearm in his flat. This year, he was able to be with us. He showed us some slides of home - and of the feast that the village, most of whom are not part of his very small congregation, had put on in hnour of his return. Physically, he's a small man, quite slight. And he told the story of how the police who had arrested him had filed a report saying that he was violent, and had beaten up the five of them who had come to arrest him. And he laughed as he told it.

There was a lot of laughter.

The Turkmen who came to the Council were there for the first time, and to celebrate their coming, they had brought a traditional hat worn by authoratative figures - as they put it themselves, it looks like nothing so much as a dead animal; round, white, and very furry. They presented it to our General Secretary when the Council his reappointment for another period of service. He promised to wear it whenever he is being official - and we very much hope he doesn't, since he looks extremely silly in it.

There was a great deal of laughter.

This bringing together of stories of persecution, danger and dogged faith with laughter, new friendships and the gratitude of these brothers for the support they had been offered has left me with such a lot to think about. The claim of Christ to Lordship is deeply political - if Jesus is Lord, then nobody else, no other regime, no other leader, can have the total and complete loyalty of a disciple. That is what makes this small and apparently weak churches such a fearsome threat, and why there are such determined efforts to get rid of them.

And part of how it all works out is through laughter. Because these folk know - dare to trust - that the Kingdom into which they are being called through the Lordship of Jesus will come, they can afford to laugh at the pretensions and even threats of "the kingdoms of this world". They don't do it lightly. They pay the costs. But they do it deeply. And they invited us into that joy and celebration. And it remains with me, making the prayers in which I regularly lead our congregation for those who suffer for their faith much more connected; I have faces and names now for these people. They need our support, our voice, our encouragement. But we need them too - to teach us holy laughter and celebration in the face of danger and suffering.

It brings a new meaning to the words of Ps 23; Even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me; your rod and staff they comfort me. You prepare a table before me, in the presence of my enemies.

Thy Kingdom come.

Celebrating Harvest in the City

Miles from the nearest field of corn ripe for Harvest it would surely seem more than a little strange to be celebrating the traditional Harvest to the strains of 'Come, ye thankful people, come' which is why we didn't!
Blended with a lively mix of fun and laughter the serious message of thanking God when he sends rain to water the earth was the theme our Harvest Musical - 'The Little Black Cloud' performed by members of the congregation to an appreciative audience. (pics on our website)
Supper followed with everyone contributing to the common meal with a dish of their choosing. Reflecting the diversity of cultures represented the table fayre tempted the taste buds and only a very few crumbs were left at the end of the evening.
In slightly more serious tones our Harvest worship reminded us that amidst our thankfulness for all that God provides we as Christians are called to make our own response.
Addressed by Revd Dr John Weaver, President of the Baptist Union of Great Britain, we were reminded through his illustarted sermon that 'God is Green' and that climate change is having a dramatic effect on the world and will continue to do so unless we act and changes our ways and campaign for others - especially our politcal leaders - to do the same. (MP3 recording on website).
Spotlighting the work of Christian Aid and its partners working in Burkina Faso members of the Northern Homegroup introduced the evening congregation to one man's persistence to improve the farming potential in his community and reminding us that through our persistence as individuals and as a community of God's people we can make a difference to society and the world too.
If we do then surely we might truely be in a position to 'raise the song of Harvest home'.

European Baptists get together

Last week about 120 of us from around Europe got together for the European Baptist Federation Council. The EBF is the organisation that links together Baptists from various countries around Europe - Europe here being a pretty elastic term, since, as one of our members observes, Baptists are better at mission and fellowship than they are at geography, and the EBF comprises 53 member unions from across UK, Continental Europe - as far East as Tajikistan - and taking in Iraq, Israel and Egypt. (To find out more, check http://www.ebf.org/about-ebf/)
It is always, therefore, an interesting gathering. We come from very different contexts, with different histories, outlooks and practices. And there are places where our theologies are very different.
The leading theme of this Council was creation care. We had the opportunity from hearing from Rev Dr Ernest Lucas, a scientist turned biblical scholar, who teaches at Bristol Baptist College, and who has made a study of this issue for many years. He led us through a significant and serious paper on the biblical basis for taking our care of the created order seriously. It was a tough discussion - and tougher for those for whom English was not a first language.
Nevertheless, it was disappointing, in the subsequent discussion groups, to learn that some of my Baptist brethren (and yes, I do mean the exclusive term) regarded Ernest's approach to Scripture as unbiblical and even unChristian, and that his argument that creation care is part of the calling of disciples was a distortion of the gospel. The narrowness of their vision of the calling of God to the people of God that some people were holding on to was hard to hear. If Jesus has indeed come to bring life in all its fulness, then that must have something to say about the quality of life that we share with others on the planet - even the quality of life that those of us in the privileged world impose on others.
A conversation at the table at the end of the week focussed on what aspect of our faith would we be willing to die for (there were good reasons for this, which I will discuss in another post). Thinking it over later, I realised that while identifying what we might die for is a good way of getting to grips with what our priorities are, recongisning what we are willing to let others die for might be a helpful way of seeing where our sinfulness is. As one of our deacons reminds us; "Jesus tells us to love our neighbours. My neighbour in Bangladesh is drowning because of climate chaos. What does that tell me?"